Light emitting, transmitting and detecting semiconductor devices are well known in the art. In the field of optoelectronics, it is known that doped gallium arsenide and other semiconductor materials can emit light upon the application of a current, and are therefore useful in the manufacture of double heterostructure quantum well, and quantum wire lasers, and light emitting diodes. With a properly chosen semiconductor sandwich structure, light can also be guided within the semiconductor, and it can also be detected by optical detectors. One of the more widely used light emitting devices is a heterojunction light emitter which is fabricated, for example, using a gallium arsenide/aluminum gallium arsenide material system. In such devices, a pair of layers such as aluminum gallium arsenide of opposite conductivity type are sandwiched around an active region of a smaller band gap material such as gallium arsenide. The interfaces between the active region and the wide band gap layers form a pair of heterojunctions. These heterojunctions effectively provide both carrier and optical confinement. Double heterojunctions are also used to confine light in waveguides. The light emitters are generally energized by using an electrical current but they can also be optically pumped. Light emitting devices such as those described are generally grown by metal organic vapor phase epitaxy (MOVPE), molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), liquid phase epitaxy, or other suitable thin film deposition techniques. The most preferred means to control vertical dimensions in semiconductor devices is to grow thin films by MBE or MOVPE. These are used to form multilayers of semiconductors having various band gaps. The control of lateral dimensions by forming layers of different band gaps laterally allows the manufacture of such advanced devices as high performance heterostructure lasers, passive optical waveguides, quantum well boxes and quantum well wires. Such has been achieved in the art by impurity induced lattice disordering which causes the discrete layers to interdiffuse thereby forming a more homogeneous mixture. The properties of the homogenized layer are approximately the average of the two originally separate layers. An important point is that the homogenized layer has a larger energy gap and a smaller index of refraction than the GaAs layer, thus enabling the homogenized region to confine and guide the light generated in the GaAs layer.